Thursday, October 07, 2004

Open Letter to the Columbia SPJ Board

Renee Giordano, executive director of the Business Improvement District, Sunset Park, said she won't talk to students anymore unless she sees the stories after they're done. She has to account for her time, she said. She's asked before, but hasn't seen anything yet.

Sick and tired of giving interviews for articles that they know will never be published, some New Yorkers are asking why Columbia Journalism School – supposedly the nation’s most prestigious journalism program – has no published outlet for its students' work.

Every week, 200 talented, ambitious young reporters file stories to Columbia Journalism School professors who read them before dispatching them to the circular file never to be seen again. Because Columbia has no student-driven publication during the fall semester, (Bronx Beat and Columbia News Service both operate in the spring), this great mass of citywide reporting largely goes to waste when it could be illuminating neighborhoods all over town.

Out on my beat in Melrose, I routinely hear flak about J-school students who appear once and then are never heard from again. The animus has gotten so bad that some community leaders are refusing to meet with us at all. In order to get an interview with a prominent Bronx activist who had forsworn Columbia J-school students, I told her I was simply “a freelance reporter.” It worked.

It’s a real shame, because we care about the communities that we’re covering and we’re pouring our hearts into our stories, only to see them disappear. Is it any wonder why our sources express bewilderment? We spend hours interviewing sources – only to find that we have nowhere to print our stories.

Which is too bad, because we’re really good. In less than two months, J-School students have published stories in the New York Times, the New York Post, the Daily News, the Village Voice, the Christian Science Monitor, ABCNEWS.com, Wired, the Amsterdam News, the Greenpoint Star, the Harlem Citizen, and others. During the Republican National Convention, J-Schoolers were firing off dispatches to regional newspapers around America.

200 Columbia J-Schoolers, the best and the brightest, can't generate enough good stories to justify their own citywide newspaper? Nonsense. We're sitting on a motherlode of talent - let's put it to work.

We’ve got the juice – we just need the dispenser. Just imagine what Columbia Journalism School students could do with a dedicated New York weekly featuring our best and most inscisive work.

Therefore: SPJ should make its #1 priority for this year the establishment of a two-semester New York City metro newspaper whose coverage would include every beat assigned to students, an editorial board composed of J-school students, and a budget to pay writers and photographers. In the spirit of euthanasia, The Bronx Beat should be retired with the dignity it deserves, in full recognition that it is time to create something new - an outlet for future J-schoolers to publish the stories that they produce in good faith every week. The SPJ should immediately appoint an ad-hoc board to draw up plans for the new publication, establish a website and begin publishing.

210 Comments:

Maybe you're right Cyrus - it would be an uphill battle to get something going this year, so why don't we just forget it.

That's nonsense. All you'd need to get it going would be a domain name, some server space and few people willing to spend some extra time working on it. We've got content coming out of our arse!! It doesn't need to be a print operation at first. It's true that some of our intended audience may not have Internet access, but this number will decrease and besides - the point is to get theball rolling.

Part of the problem is that because this is a one year program, there is little motivation to work on issues whose full benefit may come after we're gone. But I can tell you, if we were able to establish a new citywide paper, future classes would thank us, and we would have performed a valuable service to the institutional well being of this school.

I believe that nothing less than the relationship between Columbia J-School and the local community is at stake and the time to take decisive action is now.

This isn't the first warning sign we've seen that the J-school's PR is in steady decline and that the RW1 curriculum as it was once designed in the golden days of yore may be in serious trouble.

As the SPJ representative in charge of looking into the feasibility of a viable newspaper for the Journalism school, I'd like to tell you and whoever is reading the blog these days that we are on the job.

Working within an Ivy League bureaucracy is not easy. It will not happen this year, especially with the second-year curriculum still in the making. But in case you think we're alone in our complaints, check this out... Found by SPJ member Jared Allen, from the New York Observer:

Columbia J-School Students Terrify Locals

A few weeks before graduating from the Columbia Graduate School ofJournalism two years ago, Shelley Preston was asked by the yearbookcommittee for a quote capturing her Columbia experience. "It was aneasy choice," said Ms. Preston, who now works for a Floridanewspaper. "Being a student journalist covering big-city news, youfeel like you’re playing make-believe. It’s like, ‘Hi, I’m apretend journalist writing a pretend story—do you mind taking a fewhours out of your day to talk to me?’"

Ms. Preston chose a quote she’d gotten from a secretary for StateAssembly member Joseph Lentol, who had cut off an inquisitive Ms.Preston after she identified herself as a Columbia student. "Oh no,no, no. Oh, God help me," said the secretary. "It’s that time again?You people come around and bother us every year and don’t writeshit."

As loath as some students might be to admit it, the secretary has apoint. As part of the required Reading and Writing 1 course, newColumbia J-schoolers have to put together a "beat note"—a long anddetailed memo outlining potential sources and story ideas. The onlyway they can complete the assignment is by working the phones,pestering community activists and public officials in a particularneighborhood for information. Since multiple students are oftenassigned to the same neighborhood, officials and activists face atorrent of calls. One community board chair, Martin Collins, saidhe’s heard from about 50 students so far this year.

"Every fall it’s like—what’s that movie?—The Day of the Locust,"said Walter Delgado, president of the Audubon Partnership inWashington Heights. "At one point, I almost called the school tolet them know it was getting out of hand."

Mr. Delgado never called, but the school still got the message.

"We know people sometimes get hugely irritated at J-schoolers," saidBruce Porter, special assistant to the dean of Columbia’s J-Schooland author of the nonfiction book Blow, later made into a filmstarring Johnny Depp. "We labor over it every fall; there’s just noway around it. The only people who actually want to talk to Columbiastudents are people who are oppressed and getting screwed and needsomebody to complain to."

Last year, Mr. Porter sent an e-mail to the student body askingstudents to "not hound" the New York Police Department formaterials, such as press releases, that they could get elsewhere."The police are going through a stage of trying to be nice to theschool," Mr. Porter wrote, "and we don’t want to irritate themneedlessly."

Around the same time that Mr. Porter sent the e-mail, a policesupervisor accused a Columbia student of stealing a detective’snotebook. (The student denied the theft, and the conflict was neverresolved.)

And then there are the everyday issues. "I went out to Mott Haven,in the South Bronx, to do a ride-along with the police," saidJ-schooler Richard Morgan. "I got all the way out there, waited anhour, and then they decided they wouldn’t take me out." Why? "Theysaid they’d run out of bulletproof vests," he said. His efforts atrescheduling didn’t go particularly well, either: "They don’t likeit when you say, ‘I can’t do it that night because I have class.’"(Ultimately, he did get to go on a "watered-down" ride-along.)

While some students have been able to talk to individual detectives,official channels are drying up. "At this point," said Mr. Porter,"we don’t encourage students to contact [the NYPDpublic-information office], because they likely aren’t going todeal with them at all."

The J-schoolers have some tactics for keeping theirlow-on-the-totem-pole status obscured. "They tell us to say we’rereporters from Columbia University—not students," said Wendy Leung."But people want to know where a story is going to be published, andso you end up telling them you’re a student. And then they don’twant to talk to you."

The hardest people to deal with, many students said, are those oncommunity boards. After filling up a cup of coffee in the J-schoollounge, student Mara Altman described her experience. "You go up tothem after a meeting, and when you tell them the story isn’t goingto print, they’re like, ‘Mmmmm,’" said Ms. Altman, adopting anexaggerated frown.

Zead Ramadan, former chairman of Manhattan Community Board 12, saidthe students sometimes expected too much. "They’d come in, and I’dsit there for an hour answering a slew of very obvious questionsthat they could have gotten from a pamphlet," he said. "Some ofthem would get offended if you weren’t immediately responsive,because they think you’re pompous, that you’re caught up in yourpower." Like many people who regularly deal with J-school students,Mr. Ramadan learned to organize one meeting per semester to whichall students were invited. If a student missed it, he said, theywere out of luck.

Mr. Ramadan, however, isn’t unsympathetic to students who have todepend on the kindness of strangers. "You get frustratedsometimes," said Matt Goad, who worked for newspapers in NorthCarolina before enrolling at Columbia. "You’re sent out on thesestories—the professor wants you to do this, talk to this person,and you just feel like you’re not being taken seriously. It’s hardto go from working somewhere and getting paid and being productive,to paying and having people not take you seriously."

"There’s this pressure of being in school in New York and beingflooded with this sense that you’re doing this very importantthing," added Mr. Morgan. "The faculty sends you this message thatyou should earn your keep by doing really gritty street-levelreporting. But the students are unfamiliar with it."

Many Columbia students hail from neighborhoods that don’t look muchlike those they’re assigned to report on. "You get to yourneighborhood, get out of the subway and look around, like: ‘O.K.,now what?’" said Ms. Leung. Not surprisingly, they tend to approachpotential sources with relatively broad questions, at least at thebeginning.

"They’re told to look for a story on sanitation issues or gangviolence or something like that," said Michele Morazan of AlianzaDominicana in Washington Heights. "And they really don’t know whatto focus on, or what’s going on in the area. It’s not like wherethey are on campus, maybe. They’re not sure what to ask." Ms.Morazan said she tries to be accommodating, but it isn’t alwayseasy, particularly when she gets multiple calls from students eachweek: "I mean, we don’t have a press office—I’m the press office."

Mike Fitelson, editor of the Washington Heights–based ManhattanTimes newspaper, said some of the more industrious students havecalled to pick his brain. "They want to know everything about theneighborhood," he said. "And I’m happy to help." The only problem?"I’ve had people [in the community] ask me to not give their nameto students anymore."

A couple years ago, representatives from Sustainable South Bronxgave Columbia students a bus tour to let them know what was goingon in the neighborhood. "Since then," said Elena Conte ofSustainable South Bronx, "we’ve been pretty popular. We didn’trealize the Pandora’s box we were opening up."

In the Bronx, however, many residents welcome the students, in largepart because they put out a real weekly newspaper, The Bronx Beat."One of the things I like about The Bronx Beat is that the studentsare expected to get their facts correct and their quotes correct, sothey really make an effort to be accurate," said Margaret Hetley, alibrarian in Hunt’s Point. "They cover a lot of stuff which is notcovered in other ways, and any way we can help that out is great."Ms. Hetley sees so many students, she joked, that the school shouldpay her for it.

Projects like The Bronx Beat and the Columbia News Service (a newswire affiliated with The New York Times), which both run in thespring semester, get students’ work read outside Columbia’srarefied halls. But that’s little solace to those who feel likethey’re just treading water before grabbing their credential andmoving on to bigger things.

"There aren’t a lot of aspiring Jimmy Breslins at Columbia," saidCorey Pein, who graduated last year and now works as a fellow atColumbia Journalism Review. "Most of them would rather write6,000-word epics in The New Yorker than hang around some CityCouncil meeting in Queens."

Of course, upon graduation, many will be hanging around City Councilmeetings—if not in Queens, then somewhere else. Until then, they’llkeep asking strangers to talk about their lives, alternativelyadopting the pose of a big-city reporter and of a kid just tryingto do his homework.

"We’re supposed to act like professional journalists, but we’renot," said Ms. Leung. "We can’t say, ‘You’ll see your name inprint.’ All we can say is, ‘I’ll read it, and so will myprofessor.’"

—Brian Montopoli

(Brian Montopoli works for the Columbia Journalism Review. He didn’tgo to journalism school.)

I'm on the SPJ board, and I read your blog all the time. I really appreciated your post and I think it brings up a lot of good points. As the NY Observer article noted, we come off as pretend reporters doing pretend stories asking sources to take time out of their real busy days to humor us. It's incredibly patronizing to expect our sources to take time for us and when they do we should consider ourselves lucky. I think even if we had a website where our (better) stories were published, then sources might be less reluctant to talk to us. I also think the j-school should make an effort to get involved with small community newspapers/newsletters/circulars, either in terms of pitching stories to them or (more likely) letting them print stories we write about their neighborhoods for free. That'd be community service and clips in one fell swoop.BTW you forgot to mention the Gotham Gazette (http://www.gothamgazette.com) in your list of places where j-school students have published. I have to give a shout-out to GG. :-)

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